Play With Your Food: Rolling Dice For Dinner Decisions

by Joanne Camas

on 03/13/14 at 12:50 PM

Two sisters turned inventors to bring fun back to food. "We believe that whether you're a self-professed foodie or just starting to think a bit more about your food, cooking can be an adventure rather than a chore," say Sarah and Liz Downey.

Their idea? Foodie Dice: Cool wooden cubes printed with ingredients. Simply toss them on a table, and create unusual combos for a meal.

Sarah Downey stepped out of the kitchen to share some of the great flavor combinations Food Dice aficionados have cooked up so far, and told us about her and Liz's passion for eating locally and seasonally.

I know you invented Foodie Dice when you were stuck for creative cooking ideas. What made dice the perfect answer for you?

There are over 186,000 possible combos, and at the risk of sounding like geeks, we have a spreadsheet that generates all the possibilities. We used it a lot when we were developing the dice, and it steered us away from making choices that just didn't work well. Perhaps it's time to add some booster dice with more unusual ingredients.

Are there any traditional cooking "rules" that you've broken and found delicious?

I don't know that this is a broken rule, but we've found that bacon makes pretty much any meal better!

Have other people playing with the dice reported any exceptional combos?

It's been really cool to see the meals inspired by Foodie Dice. Someone made lemon almond-crusted mahi-mahi with garlic-roasted potatoes that looked really good. Another dish was pan-fried chicken thighs with dill, kale, and bacon. A food blogger cooked up braised lamb with polenta, garlic-roasted mushrooms, and fennel salad. It always impresses me when people take on lamb, because I think it's outside a lot of people's comfort zones. I just wish we could taste all the meals people post!

Foodie Dice come with seasonal options--do you feel it's important for people to cook with what's available locally?

There are so many reasons to cook with what's available locally. For starters, taste, of course! Eating local means eating seasonal, and vegetables taste the best (not to mention they're more nutrient-dense) when they're at their peak and have been freshly harvested. And yes, we feel it's important to support local farmers and economies, and to really connect with the people who are growing our food. It's easy to become disconnected when you only shop at the supermarket, but when you go to the farmer's market and actually meet the person who grew your food, you start to appreciate it and them even more. You start thinking more about how all of your food is produced--and that's a really good thing.

Do you have plans for any extra booster sets? Ethnic cuisines, perhaps?

We're developing a couple of sets we're really excited about, and there'll be more to come after that. One of the great things about our Kickstarter campaign was all the community participation--there were a lot of great suggestions, and we have a good idea now of what people would like to see next. Stay tuned!

Any surprising customers? Chefs, schoolkids, nutritionists…

Someone bought several Foodie Dice sets to give as gifts to celebrity chefs and sponsors of a dinner honoring the James Beard Foundation, which was pretty cool. But we get even more excited when people buy them to use with kids. We love to see kids learning to cook early on and discovering a variety of whole foods in a way that's fun so that they have the tools that they need to stay healthy and maybe make better choices about what they eat as they grow up.